Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time

WORD of the DAY

I tell you, unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter into the kingdom of heaven.(Matthew 5: 20)

How shall I live this Word?

Often Matthew’s Gospel confronts us with problem of justice and helps us to give new meaning to this virtue, to this moral principle that regulates human society. Matthew grasps how Jesus has come to re-found relationships not only among human beings but between God and humans as well. The justice he lived was the one based on the Ten Commandments. As a good Jew, he understood how Jesus had brought new tablets of the law to the new people of God. He Himself had spoken of this in the discourse of the Beatitudes: a new Mount Sinai is the background of the transmission of the words that orient life and bring the old law to fulfillment even within an extraordinary resolution of continuity in the words, ‘but I tell you’.

Jesus takes up the three basic commandments: do not kill, do not commit adultery, do not give false witness and He re-writes them in the Gospel. We kill even by ignoring, calumniating, denigrating a person, not only by taking their life. We commit adultery even by only desiring, appropriating a person for what they have and do without considering what they are. We give false witness every time our words are ambiguous and say only what is opportune, humanly respectful, but not true.

The tables of the law of Moses clearly defined good and evil. The Discourse on the Mountain does not give definitions; it narrates the state of beatitude. It is a story that enters into our history and our body to the point of making evident how necessary is an adhesion confirmed in time to this spirit, an adhesion that shows the evangelization of every member of our body. The new justice goes arm in arm with equity, but also with equilibrium, with a humanity that is worked, aware, humble, and intelligent.

Lord, bless the daily effort to know ourselves, to correct ourselves, to become ever more certain in age, but also in wisdom and grace.